Thursday, August 31, 2017

Quebec politics have always been mercurial. What has applied for a decade can be reversed in the next decade. And so it is that, in la belle province, the NDP fortress has crumbled. Chantal Hebert writes:

The enthusiasm that attended the 2011 orange
wave has given way to widespread voter indifference as well as internal
discomfort within the province’s depleted NDP ranks.

None
of the four candidates has emerged as a panacea for the party’s
post-election blues. Many of the province’s New Democrats see little
light at the end of the leadership tunnel.

A
Léger Marketing poll published this weekend by Le Devoir, the Gazette
and the Globe and Mail found 80 per cent of respondents unable or
unwilling to state a preference for any of the contenders for Thomas
Mulcair’s job.

At the moment, all indications are that Jagmeet Singh will win the leadership. In Montreal his victory might be cheered. But, in the hinterland, euphoria would probably be hard to find:

It is increasingly common in the dying days of
this campaign to hear some Quebec New Democrats warn that under a
turban-wearing Sikh leader, the party will hit a wall in the province.

On
Sunday in Montreal, Singh asked the audience attending the campaign’s
only French-language debate to look beyond his turban and beard. But the
fact is, his identity is a major, and in some instances, the main
attraction for many of his supporters.

It
is not primarily the ideas and the policies he has put forward in this
campaign that have some party members dreaming of a big NDP breakthrough
in the more multicultural quarters of Canada.

Quebecers are not the only ones who could be repelled by a Singh victory. But, more importantly, he is no native son -- as was the case with Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair.

Guy Caron can make that claim. However, "of the 124,000 members eligible to vote for the next leader, fewer than
5,000, making up a measly 4 per cent of the total, are from Quebec. When
the party selected Mulcair to succeed Jack Layton, it had almost three
times as many Quebec members."

What it all means is that, in the next election, there will be no Orange Crush.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Turn on Russian television any day of the week and you are certain to
stumble upon a show in which a group of people who appear to be regular
citizens (that is, they have no uniforms or government-issued documents)
stage a raid of one sort or another. They barge into a store or a
restaurant, for example, and demand to see employees’ identity
documents, the storage area, or the cooking facilities. Without fail,
they find violations of laws or regulations: the staff, natives of
Central Asia, don’t have work permits! The store stocks vodka bottles
with no alcohol-tax stamps affixed to them! The cook doesn’t cover her
hair! At the end of the show, the raiders often pass their tearful,
terrified victims to uniformed law enforcement officers, who sometimes
appear less than enthusiastic about the task being handed to them.

These raiders have no official titles or legal powers. What directs
their actions are the militant rhetoric and the promise of broad
impunity that emanate from the Kremlin—and, of course, the glory and
recognition of being on television.

Putin did not invent vigilantes, of course: autocrats frequently rely on
delegating violence to extralegal actors or, as in the case of Rodrigo
Duterte of the Philippines, on the willingness of law enforcement
officers to carry out extralegal violence in exchange for the promise of
impunity. Duterte has made this promise explicit; more often,
incitement to violence contains a tacit guarantee of protection.

Donald Trump has copied Putin's rough justice:

Over the last two weeks, we have seen Donald Trump send out both kinds
of signals to the vigilantes of his own choosing. His refusal to condemn
the violent marchers in Charlottesville, in pointed and repeated break
with political convention, was rightly interpreted by the white
supremacists as a signal of encouragement. And his pardoning of former
sheriff Joe Arpaio—before he was even sentenced—protected a law
enforcement officer from facing any consequences for a long history of
brutal violations of constitutional rights. Trump had encouraged
extralegal violence in the past—like when he called on police not to be
“too nice” to suspects. But the two weeks bracketed by the violence in
Charlottesville and the pardon of Arpaio herald a definite turn away
from the institutions of a government he despises.

In Russia, there are no institutions to rein Putin in. In the United States, those institutions used to exist. The question Americans -- and the rest of the world -- faces is: Do those institutions still exist?

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

That wind is blowing up from the South. Ontario's elementary teachers want to remove John A. Macdonald's name from public schools in the province. The issue is Macdonald's treatment of native peoples -- more particularly the role he played in setting up the residential school system. Tom Walkom writes that, if Macdonald's name is erased from public institutions, the names of several prime ministers will also have to be expunged:

Wilfrid Laurier, the Liberal prime minister
whose government famously urged Eastern European “men in sheepskin
coats” to settle the West, was in the broadest sense pro-immigration.
But he also did his best to keep the Chinese out of Canada.

William
Lyon Mackenzie King, the long-serving prime minister who steered Canada
through the Second World War was, in the mid-1930s, a secret fan of
Adolph Hitler’s labour relations policies.

Under King, Canada was extremely reluctant to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler.

J.S.
Woodsworth, the first leader of what is now the New Democratic Party,
was a fierce advocate of workers’ rights. But his 1909 book on
immigration, Strangers Within our Gates, uses race-based language that would get him expelled from today’s NDP.

Robert
Borden is generally regarded as a nation-builder who steered Canada
through the First World War and into international prominence. But he
can also be seen as a nation-buster, whose decision to introduce
conscription fanned animosity between English and French Canada.

Even modern politicians are complicated.
Pierre Trudeau was at one level a civil libertarian whose efforts led to
Canada’s constitutionally entrenched charter of rights and freedoms.

Yet he was also the man who, during the FLQ crisis of 1970, casually suspended civil rights, a move that led to the arrest without charge of almost 500 innocent people.

The problem is -- and it has always been -- that public figures are deeply flawed. If we are to remember them, they must be remembered warts and all. Given the standard which is being set here and to the south, very few people would pass muster with succeeding generations. Marc Antony was right: "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

Remembering what we did wrong is no excuse for not recalling what we did right. That rule applies to all of us -- public figures and the least among us.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Last week, Mike Duffy launched a lawsuit against The Senate and the Attorney General. No one should be surprised. Michael Harris writes:

Who could seriously argue that both the political system and the
justice department failed Duffy in spectacular fashion given what came
out at his criminal trial? On April 21, 2016, the senator was acquitted
on every single one of the 31 criminal charges against him. The judge
laid the blame for this whole charade at the door of the Harper PMO,
which he concluded was doing damage control for its own purposes. Duffy
was the scapegoat, a mere diversionary sideshow.

Judge Charles Vaillancourt asked, “Was Nigel Wright actually ordering
senior members of the Senate around as if they were mere pawns on a
chess board?” Vaillancourt answered his own question with an emphatic
“yes.”

Given what has happened since the trial, Duffy's suit was inevitable:

After his acquittal, Duffy tried to resolve matters of lost salary
and legal fees with the Red Chamber. On December 12, 2016 he wrote to
the Senate asking for reimbursement of his salary, living allowances,
and pension accruals.

To date, he hasn’t even been given the courtesy of a response.

The Conservatives still control the Committee on Internal Economy,
Budgets and Administration (CIBA). Despite being acquitted after a
brutal criminal trial, despite a finding that his expenses were
permissible under the rules, the Senate is still treating Duffy as if he
were guilty. The Conservative brain trust seems to believe it is
possible to crucify the same person twice.

I have written several times that the Conservatives have learned nothing from their defeat. It's true that Duffy is no abandoned child, left to the mercy of a callous society. Nonetheless, Vaillancourt's decision makes it clear that Duffy was wronged.

And Stephen Harper's senators believe -- like their bloated orange cousin to the south -- that they can ignore a judge's order. That kind of contempt can get very expensive.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Donald Trump says he pardoned Joe Arpaio because of his long and distinguished government service. But Dara Lind writes that you don't have to dig too deep to find the real reason for the pardon:

Sheriff Arpaio played a key role in validating Donald Trump, whose
candidacy was initially seen as a joke, as the champion of hardline
immigration policies and the cultural anxieties that came alongside
them. Trump’s first truly major campaign rally, in August 2015, was in
Phoenix with Arpaio and some of the “Angel Moms” (mothers of people
killed by unauthorized immigrants) he would continue to co-opt as a
candidate and president. Arpaio formally endorsed Trump in January 2016 — before a single primary vote had been cast. He took a gamble, and he won.

So it makes sense that Trump, who has some apparent loyalty to people
who supported him back when he was one of 17 Republican presidential
candidates, would think warmly of Arpaio. But the endorsement isn’t
really the basis of their simpatico. It’s just an acknowledgment of the
political truth that Trump is engaging in exactly the same brand of
politics that Arpaio pioneered a decade earlier. As politicians, they
used tough-on-crime rhetoric and breaches of “political correctness” to
give the impression of sticking up for law and order; as government
executives, they exercised their power to the greatest possible extent,
without a ton of attention paid to the rule of law.

Like Trump, Arpaio communicated toughness through big, theatrical stunts
— raids conducted with armored vehicles, the pink underwear, the tent
cities — that often happened to violate the rights of their targets.
(The tent cities were ultimately shut down after being cited as
violations of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against “cruel and
unusual punishment.”) His “law and order” policies weren’t successful as
anti-crime measures (911 response times went up hugely during the
heyday of Arpaio’s sweeps), but succeeded in terms of targeting and
victimizing the intended people.

Both men are oxymoronic soul brothers. They claim to stand for law and order while simultaneously having complete contempt for the law. Both men are boiling cauldrons of contradiction. One can only hope that they fall into their own pots.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Donald Trump's opponents are outraged -- as they should be. But Trump is the Master of Distraction. One outrage is rapidly followed by another. He constantly shifts the focus of his critics. Jonathan Freedland writes:

If Trump succeeds in moving past Charlottesville, it won’t only be
thanks to an unavoidable process of attrition that has worn liberals
down. I’m afraid Trump’s opponents made a tactical error. He wanted to
change the subject to the question of Confederate statues – and they let
him. Days after those violent clashes had seen an antiracist protester
murdered, the national conversation centred not on that act of terrorism
but on which historical figures should be remembered, and how.

Make no mistake, that’s an important argument. But it is inevitably a nuanced one that, as we have seen in Britain too, divides liberal opinion.
Two people, equally fervent in their loathing of racism, might disagree
on whether it’s better to remove a monument, or keep it as a reminder
of a shaming past. And there will never be an easy consensus on where to
draw the line. If owning slaves is the key criterion, should the
statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson come down too?

Trump’s opponents have spent much of the past two weeks talking about
Confederate generals and US history, when they should have maintained a
laser focus on the key and shocking point: that an American president
spoke with sympathy and admiration for neo-Nazis; that he put these
fascists on a moral par with those who oppose them; and that he was more
animated in condemning what he called the alt-left than he ever was in
lambasting those who parroted the slogans of the KKK, who brandished the
symbols of white supremacism and who chanted: “Jews will not replace us.”

I doubt that this is a conscious strategy on Trump's part. His brain is simply too chaotic to arrive at such a strategy on its own. But it's that chaotic brain which has enabled him to survive and to shift responsibility for his actions on to others.

Trump's latest outrage is issuing a pardon for Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The implications for the rule of law in the United States are ominous.

All of the outrages add up to one indisputable conclusion. Trump has no respect -- for the law, for history, for those he claims to represent. So now it is time to focus on one objective -- removing them from office.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Earlier this week the UN rebuked the United States for recent displays of racism. Nserine Malick writes:

A UN committee charged with tackling racism has issued an “early
warning” over conditions in the US and urged the Trump administration to
“unequivocally and unconditionally” reject discrimination. The warning
specifically refers to events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the
civil rights activist Heather Heyer
was killed when a car crashed into a group of people protesting against
a white nationalist rally. Such statements are usually issued by the UN
committee on the elimination of racial discrimination (Cerd) over fears
of ethnic or religious conflict. In the past decade, the committee has
only issued six warnings. Those admonishments went to Burundi, Iraq,
Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan and Nigeria.

You may have the impression that the ugliness in Charlottesville is something new. But those familiar with the history of the United States know that what happened in Virginia is as old as the Republic itself. The problem is that economic inequality brings out the worst in people. It rips a country's culture asunder:

Civilisations are undone in many ways, not all of them obvious. We tend
to think of decline along military or economic lines but it is actually a
nation’s culture, particularly in terms of equality, that determines
its civilisational credentials. America’s descent into what looks like a
full on race crisis is graphically dragging it down the “development”
scale. Reality is closing in on the country’s exceptionalist
self-perception.

In difficult times, the rights of minorities always come under attack:

It is no coincidence that the rights most easily dislodged and taken back – whether it is those of transgender members of the military
or Muslim US citizens of certain origins – are those of minorities.
Even in the United Kingdom, it is no coincidence that the first jubilant
spasm after the Brexit vote was manifested in a rise in hate crime.
It is no coincidence that making America great again, or taking back
control, inevitably involves wanting to claw back whatever little space
was ceded to diversity and equality. This reclamation lies at the very
heart of the US and UK’s modern nation-building.

The Trump Administration is following a well trodden path. The UN simply pointed that out -- and called for a change in direction.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

We live in a time of multiple crises -- the dangers from climate change, economic inequality and revived racism are real. But E. J. Dionne argues that the most pressing question we face is: "Can liberal democracy survive?"

I’d argue that the challenge to liberal democracy is far and away the
most consequential question facing the world. If liberal democracy does
not survive and thrive, every other problem we face becomes much more
difficult.

Liberal democracy is, in principle, a simple if also profound idea: a
belief in governments created through free elections and universal
suffrage; an independent judiciary; and guarantees of the freedoms of
speech, assembly, religion and press. Some of my more
libertarian-leaning friends — and in our shared desire to defend liberal
democracy, we are friends — would define it as excluding various forms
of regulation and redistribution.

The trend towards libertarianism is partly responsible for the problems we face:

I’d agree with them that the right to private property is a
characteristic of liberal societies but insist that there is also an
important place for social insurance, government provision of various
services (education and health care among them) and rules protecting
workers, consumers and the environment. Indeed, the vast inequalities
that capitalism can produce when unchecked typically undermine liberal
democracy and are doing so now.

And authoritarianism is on the rise:

History is starting to scowl as once-solid democracies (Hungary, Poland
and Turkey, along with many outside Europe) move in an autocratic
direction. China, meanwhile, offers a path to development and growth
that involves neither freedom nor democracy.

Even where liberal democracy has its strongest foundations,
authoritarian brands of populism have gained ground by exploiting
widespread discontent.

This is, indeed, our summer of discontent. The choices that spring from that discontent will make all the difference.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

David Suzuki writes that in dark times -- and these are dark times -- "we must shine brighter:"

Charlottesville was a tipping point, not so much because hatred and
ignorance were on full display (that happens all too often), but because
so many people stood up and spoke out against it, and against President
Donald Trump's bizarre and misguided response.

The effects spilled into Canada, most notably with the implosion of the far-right (and misnamed) media outlet The Rebel.
The online platform, born from the ashes of the failed Sun News
network, is a good illustration of the intersection between racism,
intolerance and anti-environmentalism. Rather than learning from Sun
News' failure that racism and extremism are unpopular and anti-Canadian,
Rebel founder Ezra Levant ramped up the bigoted and anti-environmental
messaging, with commentators ranting against feminists, LGBTQ people,
Muslims and Jews (Levant is Jewish), along with rejecting climate
science and solutions to environmental problems!

Levant has been spewing his venom for years. But the good news is that -- rather than ignoring him -- people are taking him on in the full light of day:

The Rebel's Faith Goldy was at Charlottesville,
sympathetically “reporting” on the band of mostly male white
extremists. When a racist drove his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi
protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Haley and seriously injuring
others, it was too much for some of Levant's long-time supporters.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

There is some disagreement about whether or not Mark Twain actually said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but often it rhymes." Be that as it may, Geoff Smith writes that these days, in the United States, you can hear the rhymes -- with the 1920's:

Americans in the era
both celebrated and recoiled from the impact of cosmopolitan urban
culture upon long-standing rural values. Nervous citizens also rued the
corrosive effect upon tradition of what journalist Walter Lippmann
termed the “acids of modernity” — the automobile, radio, “black” music
and literature, and, of course, bootleg liquor — upon accepted social
mores.

The
U.S. certainly helped win the Great War against the Central Powers, but
to judge from events in the following decade, the country was as anxious
as it was excited about the novel developments. Despite flappers,
bootleg gin, colourful gangsters, and a loosening of old rules, one is
struck by the American postwar dynamic of “taking back” America from
inferior races and minorities.

And, despite the roaring economy, all kinds of nasty things were coming up for air:

In its purging of socialists and other radicals, the Red Scare of
1919-20 sought to revitalize an older, Anglo-Saxon America, as did
restrictive immigration laws in 1921 and 1924, which closed the gates to
Asians and Southern and Eastern Europeans.

Race riots and a spike in lynchings in the South, meanwhile, warned blacks not to traverse Jim Crow.
The Ku Klux Klan assumed national prominence, similarly disposed
against anything new or strange. The Klan was a many-splintered thing —
anti-Semitic in the Northeast, anti-black in the South, anti-Catholic in
the Midwest, and anti-Asian on the West Coast.

Other
developments, included the burgeoning of Fundamentalist Christianity
and the famed “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tenn., which featured three-time
presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan defending the literal
truth of Jonah and the Whale, bespoke fiery Fundamentalist defences of
Protestant Christianity, the Calvinist faith of the Fathers against all
forms of religious liberalism.

In Michigan, automobile mogul Henry Ford railed against “international
Jewry,” which, he charged, had taken control of American banking and
entertainment circles. Ford’s calumnies against Jews everywhere caught
the eye of a hopeful German politician named Adolf Hitler. His
subsequent testament of hate, Mein Kampf, lifted passages verbatim from Ford.

Monday, August 21, 2017

Today, as the sun is temporarily blotted out over the United States, Barbara Will wonders if her country is in a permanent state of eclipse:

Pick up any newspaper and the evidence is clear: most Americans feel
pessimistic about the nation’s future. Since 2009, polls consistently
show that over 70% of Americans worry that the country is on the wrong
track. A full 65% believe the country is now “in a state of decline.”
More than 40% fear an imminent terrorist attack.

Worries over race relations are at a record high. Bookstore shelves
are lined with titles like The Plot to Hack America; White Rage: The
Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and Why We Hate Us: American
Discontent in the New Millennium.

The Great Experiment managed to survive the carnage of most of the 20th century:

For a large part of the 20th century, America was on the rise, enjoying a
sense of peace and growing prosperity denied the countries who had
suffered through World War I and its terrible aftermath, World War II.
Yet if empires rise, they also fall, often with what historian Alfred
McCoy has referred to as “unholy speed.”

But the last fifty years have seen remarkable missteps:

It would take our own series of violent misadventures – in Vietnam,
Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as places like Guantanamo Bay – for a
similar post-war dark mood to settle on our side of the Atlantic like a
heavy shadow.

Today's solar eclipse is only temporary. The jury is still out on whether the American eclipse is temporary.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

In this weekend's Globe and Mail, Amira Elghawaby asks, "Where has all our empathy gone?" That's a question a lot of us are asking after Charlottesville. Here in Canada, Elghawaby writes, we have no reason to look down our noses at out neighbours to the South:

The events in Charlottesville, Va., are only the most recent to explode
on our screens – and while this is happening more apparently in the
South, many agree that Canadians have nothing to be smug about.

For instance, why is it that until now our federal government has
refused to provide adequate support to Indigenous children at the same
level as other Canadian children and to cease what the Canadian Human
Rights Commission ruled is discriminatory treatment? Why aren't
Canadians writing en masse to the federal government, demanding positive
action? Is it because many of us cannot imagine what it's like to live
on reserves, with poor and inadequate housing and limited access to
subpar education?

The tragic case of Soleiman Faqiri of Ontario is another example. Last
December, the 30-year-old Canadian Muslim man was being held in solitary
confinement at the Central East Correctional Centre in Lindsay, Ont.,
waiting for a bed in a mental-health facility. He never made it. A
coroner's report released to his family last month did not determine a
cause of death, yet provides a horrific snapshot of his final hours:
After an initial confrontation, he was beaten by a large number of
prison guards, suffering more than 50 injuries – to his forehead, face,
torso and limbs, the result of blunt impact trauma. Why is there little
public outcry about this case, or others like it? Is it because most
Canadians have never experienced what the Faqiri family is now going through, still waiting for accountability, seven months after losing their loved one?

A recent study done at UC Berkeley suggests that being wealthy and well off crowds out empathy:

By measuring how those with more
wealth, occupational prestige and education behaved while driving, they
were able to conclude that those from more well-off backgrounds showed
less empathy than others.

Luxury-car
drivers were more likely than others to cut off other motorists, or
speed past pedestrians, rather than give them the right of way. The
researchers concluded that such attitudes were likely attributable to
feelings of freedom and independence that negated the need to rely on
others, or care about how others feel.

When governments and political parties are mostly concerned with wooing
middle- and upper-class voters, it is small wonder that there is less
focus on more niche social-justice issues, and more on issues perceived
as directly affecting those broader segments of our society. When
governments do buck the trend, segments of these privileged populations
will often push back aggressively, attempting to drown out those less
equipped to engage.

The search for the goose that laid the golden eggs leaves all of us in poverty.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Trump
resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral
stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with
self-regard, if we expect a president’s interest in legislation to rise
above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic
etiquette to be part of the equation.

By
those measures, it’s arguable that Trump’s presidency never really
began. By those measures, it’s indisputable that his presidency ended in
the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he chose — yes, chose —
to litigate rather than lead, to attend to his wounded pride instead of
his wounded nation and to debate the supposed fine points of white
supremacy.

Trump wanted a lot from his campaign. But one thing he didn't want was to be president:

Because of his victories in the Republican primary and then the general
election, his campaign was hailed for its tactical genius. But it was
driven by, and tailored to, his emotional cravings. All that time on
Twitter wasn’t principally about a direct connection to voters. It was a
way to stare at an odometer of approval and monitor, in real time, how
broadly his sentiments were being liked and shared.

Applause. Greater brand exposure. A new layer of perks atop an existence
already lavish with them. Utter saturation of Americans’ consciousness.
These were his foremost goals. Governing wasn’t, and that was obvious
in his haziness and dishonesty before Election Day and in his laziness
and defiance after.

Like Robert Redford's character in The Candidate, to Trump's surprise, he won. And he was faced with the question: "What do we do now? In the last six months, he's given the world his answer.

Friday, August 18, 2017

After Charlottesville, Michael Harris writes, Donald Trump becomes the touchstone by which we judge our own politicians:

The Trump White House isn’t the only North American political
institution that has lost touch with the real world. The Conservative
Party of Canada must now confront a hard fact: Their current leader
lacks the nerve to pull the party back to the centre of what might be
called ‘responsible conservatism’. In the wake of Charlottesville, that
matters. If Conservatives don’t wise up, they may become the pot-bellied
pigs of Canadian politics: yesterday’s fad that just smells up the
house now.

Andrew Scheer says he won’t grant interviews to The Rebel,
the Breitbart News wannabe run by Ezra Levant, under its current
editorial direction. That’s nice. So what was it about Rebel’s former,
pre-Charlottesville editorial direction that made Scheer comfortable
enough to appear on the website several times when he was running for
the leadership?

The Rebel was then, and is now, a collection of chocolate-encrusted nutbars — the lunatic villa of the alt-right.

And it should be said also that Scheer didn’t have any problem with
having his leadership campaign run by Hamish Marshall, who was on the
board of directors of The Rebel and is now, we are told, severing ties
with the organization. So Scheer’s attempt to pretend he has only a
passing familiarity with Ezra’s work is nonsense.

Justin Trudeau will ultimately be judged by how he deals with Trump:

And for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a postscript: Prime minister,
you can coast a long way on selfies in a content-averse universe. But
occasions arise when more is required of a leader than imagery. Donald
Trump had already given the world his wish-washy take on
Charlottesville. We didn’t need one from you.

What we needed from you was the straight goods. That means outing the
racists by name and calling out the president of the United States for
enabling violent, racist acts. That might have made your next meeting
with Trump a little uncomfortable. But it’s a little like being told an
off-color joke: If you don’t confront the person who told it, you might
as well as laugh and walk away, realizing you have been diminished.

Trump is a force to be dealt with. He cannot be ignored. And he cannot be coddled.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Donald Trump disbanded all of his business councils yesterday -- before every member of each council resigned. The message is pretty clear: Donald Trump, the businessman par excellence, is bad for business. Vichy Mochama writes:

The time will come for all brands to dissociate from this
administration. Based on the pictures of young men marching, it won’t be
too long before polo shirt companies will disavow white nationalism.
Somewhere, a public relations agency for Poly by Ralph Lauren and/or
Lacoste is in the middle of a heated debate about if and when to change
the name of their tennis whites.

Earlier this year, New Balance, the running shoe company had to clarify whether they were, as claimed by some, the official shoe of white supremacy.
Now, New Balance was once the unofficial show of “these are the
sneakers I can afford.” But they’ve moved up in the world. They’re now
the semi-official (as decided by me) show of Wearing Heels At the Office
But Not On The Way.

But like, the official
shoe of white people? Nah. Racist footwear depends on what the racist
is doing. Flip-flops aren’t inherently racist unless they’re being worn
by a non-Indigenous person who is also wearing a headdress at a music
festival. Then, yes, those are racist flip-flops.

Increasingly companies and brands are making the connection between the American administration and the racists who support it.

It's all coming down around Donald's ears. And the only thing he knows how to do is go to war -- with everybody. Soon the derisive laughter will be universal.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

When John Kelly took over as Donald Trump's Chief of Staff, many hoped that he would impose much needed discipline on the president. Monday's reworking of Trump's initial statement on Charlottesville had Kelly's fingerprints all over it. But, yesterday, we witnessed yet again how long Mr. Trump can be disciplined. This morning's New York Timeseditorializes:

Gone was the measured tone that the president’s aides had talked him
into on Monday, when he said “racism is evil” and appeared to distance
himself from his earlier claims about shared responsibility for the
violence. In its place was a high-decibel defense of his original
position, to which he added the claim that while there were “bad people”
and “very fine people” on both sides, the “very, very violent”
protesters on the “alt-left” who came “charging in without a permit”
were at least as culpable as the neo-Nazi protesters.

In so doing, Mr. Trump took up many of the talking points of the white
nationalists and far-right activists who have been complaining that the
news media and the political establishment do not pay enough attention
to leftists who call themselves anti-fascists. He also sympathized with
the demonstrators’ demand — the announced reason for their rally — that Robert E. Lee’s statue in a Charlottesville park be
saved. “Is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson
the week after?” However deep their flaws, though, Washington and
Jefferson are memorialized as heroes of American freedom, whereas Lee
symbolizes violent division. It was hardly a surprise, then, that David
Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, tweeted to thank the president for his “honesty & courage” in denouncing “leftist terrorists.”

Some are still trying to put lipstick on this pig. But yesterday confirmed that exercise is hopeless. And that Donald Trump is a very dangerous man.

The government of Canada has at last revealed its objectives for
talks on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a
month after the Trump administration released its own. Of course, the
nature of any such exercise is to reveal as much about each side’s
perceptions of the other’s negotiating position; it makes no sense to
come to the table with demands that haven’t a ghost of a chance of being
accepted.

What particularly stuck in Coyne's craw was the Trudeau government's insistence that climate change, gender and indigenous rights be put on the table: "But do Trudeau’s people really think the Trumpians could be induced to
accept bringing climate change into it? And gender? And Indigenous
rights?"

Coyne suspects that the Liberals are betting that the talks will fail:

Of three possible outcomes — a successful conclusion to the
negotiations, leading to an agreement between the three countries on a
renewed NAFTA; failure, followed by Trump making good on his threat to
abrogate the treaty; and failure, unaccompanied by abrogation — the
third may well be the most likely.

Congress would have to approve Trump's backing out of the treaty -- and these days Congress disapproves of just about everything that Trump does. Canadians might not get their wish list. But Trump wouldn't get his, either.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Sarah Palin used to say that she spoke for "real Americans." Paul Krugman writes:

She meant rural and small-town residents — white residents, it went
without saying — who supposedly embodied the nation’s true essence.

She was harshly condemned for those remarks, and rightly so — and not
just because the real, real America is a multiracial, multicultural land
of great metropolitan areas as well as small towns. More fundamentally,
what makes America America is that it is built around an idea: the idea
that all men are created equal, and are entitled to basic human rights.
Take away that idea and we’re just a giant version of a two-bit
autocracy.

Donald Trump's supporters showed up in Charlottesville over the weekend -- David Duke confirmed that fact. And Trump refused to condemn them. So what do these events tell us about the president? First, put them in context:

The man who began his political ascent by falsely questioning Barack
Obama’s place of birth — a blood-and-soil argument if ever there was one
— clearly cares nothing about the openness and inclusiveness that have
always been essential parts of who we are as a nation.

But the present occupant of the White House has made no secret of
preferring the company, not of democratic leaders, but of authoritarian
rulers — not just Vladimir Putin, but people like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoganor Rodrigo Duterte, the homicidal leader of the Philippines. When Trump visited Saudi Arabia, his commerce secretary exulted in the absence of hostile demonstrations, an absence ensured by the repressiveness of the regime.

Trump's reaction to the events of the past weekend confirm that, despite his claim that he speaks for "real Americans," Trump isn't one:

Real Americans expect public officials to be humbled by the
responsibility that comes with the job. They’re not supposed to be
boastful blowhards, constantly claiming credit for things they haven’t
done — like Trump bragging about job creation that has continued at more
or less the same pace as under his predecessor — or which never even
happened, like his mythical victory in the popular vote.

Real Americans understand that being a powerful public figure means
facing criticism. That comes with the job, and you’re supposed to
tolerate that criticism even if you feel it’s unfair. Foreign autocrats
may rage against unflattering news reports, threaten to inflict
financial harm on publications they dislike, talk about imprisoning
journalists; American leaders aren’t supposed to sound like that.

Donald Trump is what he has always been -- a fraud. He is a fake American.

Update: Apparently, the quotation I used in this morning's graphic is false. Sarah Palin did talk about real Americans. But she did not make that outrageous statement about her nation's first peoples. I apologize for the error. I have replaced the graphic.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

What happened in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend provides a vivid reminder of who and what propelled Donald Trump into the White House. Michael Eric Dyson writes:

In attendance was white separatist David Duke, who declared that the
alt-right unity fiasco “fulfills the promises of Donald Trump.” In the
meantime, Mr. Trump responded by offering false equivalencies between
white bigots and their protesters. His soft denunciations of hate ring
hollow when he has white nationalist advisers like Steve Bannon and
Stephen Miller whispering in his ear.

Their anger at the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee is rooted in a misreading of American history -- a misreading which justifies a bigotocracy:

This bigotocracy overlooks fundamental facts about slavery in this
country: that blacks were stolen from their African homeland to toil for
no wages in American dirt. When black folk and others point that out,
white bigots are aggrieved. They are especially offended when it is
argued that slavery changed clothes during Reconstruction and got
dressed up as freedom, only to keep menacing black folk as it did during
Jim Crow. The bigotocracy is angry that slavery is seen as this
nation’s original sin. And yet they remain depressingly and purposefully
ignorant of what slavery was, how it happened, what it did to us, how
it shaped race and the air and space between white and black folk, and
the life and arc of white and black cultures.

They
cling to a faded Southern aristocracy whose benefits — of alleged white
superiority, and moral and intellectual supremacy — trickled down to
ordinary whites. If they couldn’t drink from the cup of economic
advantage that white elites tasted, at least they could sip what was
left of a hateful ideology: at least they weren’t black. The renowned
scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called this alleged sense of superiority the
psychic wages of whiteness. President Lyndon Baines Johnson once argued,
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best
colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him
somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

We
have a bigoted billionaire-cum-president who has done precious little
for the white working class whose resentment fueled his rise. They have
emptied their ethical and economic pockets in support of him even though
he turned his back on them the moment he entered the Oval Office. The
only remnant of his leadership they have to hold on to is the folklore
of white nationalist sentiment, and xenophobic passion, that offer them
psychic comfort if little financial stability.

William Faulkner understood that faded and corrupt dream very well. His novels are full of characters who are warped, violent and pathetic. It seems that not much has changed since his day -- except that today a Faulknerian character occupies the White House.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

From the chair he occupies at McMaster University, Henry Giroux comments on what is happening in the United States. As Donald Trump edges closer to a confrontation with North Korea, Giroux's take on Trump rings truer than ever:

Ignorance is a terrible wound when it is self-inflicted, but it becomes a
dangerous plague when the active refusal to know combines with power.
President Trump’s lies, lack of credibility, woefully deficient
knowledge of the world, and unbridled narcissism have suggested for some
time that he lacks the intelligence, judgment and capacity for critical
thought necessary to occupy the presidency of the United States. But
when coupled with his childish temperament, his volatile impetuousness
and his Manichaean conception
of a world—a reductionist binary that only views the world in term of
friends and enemies, loyalists and traitors—his ignorance translates
into a confrontational style that puts lives, if not the entire planet,
at risk.

Trump’s seemingly frozen and dangerous fundamentalism, paired with his
damaged ethical sensibility, suggests that we are dealing with a form of
nihilistic politics in which the relationship between the search for
truth and justice on the one hand and moral responsibility and civic
courage on the other has disappeared. For the past few decades, as historian Richard Hofstadter
and others have reminded us, politics has been disconnected not only
from reason but also from any viable notion of meaning and civic
literacy. Government now runs on willful ignorance as the planet heats
up, pollution increases and people die. Evidence is detached from
argument. Science is a subspecies of “fake news,” and alternative facts
are as important as the truth. Violence becomes both the catalyst and
the result of the purposeful effort to empty language of any meaning.

Words -- and truth -- mean nothing to Trump:

Anyone who communicates intelligently is now part of the “fake news”
world that Trump has invented. Language is now forced into the service
of violence. Impetuousness and erratic judgment have become central to
Trump’s leadership, one that is as ill-informed as it is unstable. Trump
has ushered in a kind of anti-politics and mode of governance in which
any vestige of informed judgment and thought is banished as soon as it
appears. His rigid, warlike mentality has created an atmosphere in the
United States in which dialogue is viewed as a weakness and compromise
understood as personal failing.

The United States is in deep trouble. But now -- thanks to Trump -- we all are in deep trouble.

Friday, August 11, 2017

While Donald Trump was threatening North Korea with "fire and fury," Canada secured the release of one of its citizens -- Hyeon Soo Lim -- from the Hermit Kingdom. Michael Harris writes that Justin Trudeau could have torn a page out of Donald Trump's playbook:

Trudeau could have jabbed back. He could have said that North Korea was
being run by a dictator in training pants, a misguided, vicious child
trying to ape the dubious accomplishments of his autocratic father and
grandfather. He could have asked what else one could expect from someone
who has his own people executed with an anti-aircraft gun. He
could have said Kim was a madman with whom Canada would have nothing to
do unless Lim was released on our terms. But he didn’t.

Instead, Trudeau went about the business of securing Lim’s release
quietly. The PM employed his national security adviser, Daniel Jean. The
Canadian group that went to work on the task teamed up with the Swedish
diplomatic mission inside North Korea, where only 24 countries have
embassies. Canada is not one of them.

Sweden functions as a ‘protective power’ for Canada in North Korea;
in other words, it assumes consular responsibilities there for our
citizens, like Lim.

Trudeau was not turning a new page. He was operating from an old Canadian playbook:

This country invented UN peacekeeping. Lester Pearson won the Nobel
Prize for preventing the Suez Crisis from turning into a wider regional
war in the Middle East. Though this is less well-known, Pearson also
kept Canada out of the Vietnam War (just as Jean Chrétien kept this
country out of the disastrous Iraq War that Stephen Harper was so
anxious to fight).

But perhaps the person Trump could learn the most from when it comes
to avoiding violent solutions is General John de Chastelain, a former
Canadian chief of the defence staff and the man who helped broker peace
between the Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Defence Force in
Northern Ireland.

As it happened, I was attending school in Dublin during one of the
deadlier phases of the battle between the IRA and the UDF. Back then,
the conventional wisdom was that there was no bridge to peace in the
seemingly endless cycle of sectarian violence between Catholics and
Protestants.

But through two years of patience and diplomacy, de Chastelain and
others came up with a plan to put an end to the Troubles — the so-called
Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The deal was strongly endorsed in
referenda held in the 26-county Republic of Ireland and the six counties
of Northern Ireland. Where guns and bombs had failed, diplomats
succeeded — through faith, hard work and goodwill.

Soft power works. But it takes time, patience and intelligence -- qualities which the current President of the United States clearly lacks.

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Andrew Coyne writes that, for those who thought -- despite his flaws -- Donald Trump would be a better occupant of the White House than Hillary Clinton, the truth has come home to roost:

Those who had convinced themselves that, whatever Trump’s manifest
unfitness for office, “at least he isn’t Hillary,” if they had not
already repented of their folly over the previous six months, must
surely do so now. (He said with no conviction whatever.) The presidency
is not a ceremonial post; neither is it a program of policy. It is a
command centre, with decisions to be made, many on short notice,
sometimes with the most profound consequences. All of the U.S.
Constitution’s careful separation of powers and checks and balances —
though thank God for them — cannot erase the awful power of the office.
Only Congress can declare war, but a president can sure start one.

Granted, dealing with North Korea is a Gordian Knot that has defied solution:

Dealing with North Korea would tax the abilities of the ablest of
presidents, and has. Trump cannot be blamed for the regime’s having
acquired nuclear weapons: that was the legacy of previous presidents of
both parties, whose concessions and bribes had no more effect on its
actions than Trump’s threats. But now that it has nukes, it demands the
most delicate and assured handling, one requiring deep experience in
matters of state, subtle understanding of human nature, judgment,
fortitude and sang-froid.

Having an occupant who is clearly unqualified and temperamentally unsuited for the job underscores the fact that it matters who occupies the White House:

Much speculation has surrounded Trump’s mental state, but as a madman he
is not in Kim’s league. He is, rather, a fairly conventional bunkum
artist — more unprincipled than most, to be sure, indeed seemingly
unburdened by any commitment to fact, but ultimately a transparent
bluffer. For all his attempt to play the bully, Trump can no more be
counted on to deliver on a threat than a promise. Recall how his first
bits of bravado, the suggestion that he might recognize Taiwan, or move
the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, ended: dropped at the first
hint of pushback.

At this late stage in the planet's evolution, we cannot afford to have a monumental bunkum artist in the Oval Office.

Wednesday, August 09, 2017

North Korea and the United States have reached a moment of truth. David Ignatius writes:

If Washington and Beijing manage to stay together in dealing with
Pyongyang, the door opens on a new era in which China will play a larger
and more responsible role in global affairs, commensurate with its
economic power. If the great powers can’t cooperate, the door will slam
shut — possibly triggering a catastrophic military conflict on the
Korean Peninsula.

Donald Trump's threat to unleash "fire and fury" has not helped:

The U.S. threat may be a bluff, but with Trump, you never know. Top U.S.
officials understand that a preemptive war against North Korea could
result in horrendous loss of life and a post-conflict outcome that would
be worse for all parties. But when national security adviser H.R.
McMaster says that a nuclear-armed North Korea is “intolerable” to Trump, one should assume he means it — and that he is preparing a menu of military options.

We are edging to the brink -- and the future is uncertain:

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said
Monday, in reaction to the U.N. vote and Chinese-American calls for
talks: “We will under no circumstances put the nukes and ballistic
rockets on the negotiating table.” Is he bluffing? Again, we don’t know.

The Defense Intelligence Agency concluded late last month that North
Korea has mastered the technology for a miniaturized nuclear warhead
that could sit atop a missile that could hit the United States, according to The Post. A white paper by Japan’s defense ministry reached a similar conclusion and warned that the nuclear threat was now an imminent problem.

Some commentators call this a "catalytic moment." Things are speeding up. But what the world is speeding to is anyone's guess. Pessimist that I am, I'm not hopeful. I am certain of one thing: the big bang is not a theory.

Tuesday, August 08, 2017

So you think that with Trump gone it will be morning in American again? Think again. Paul Mason writes:

The scenario being touted in Democrat circles is that Trump tries and
fails to sack Mueller, one or more suspects gets immunity and the beans
are spilled. Trump then either resigns or is impeached. Mike Pence
becomes president. Only then do we get to know what the rightwing billionaires behind the project really want.
Because Trump was never their first pick: for the first six months of
his campaign, the main elite donor to the Trump campaign was Donald J
Trump himself. It was only when the religious conservative Ted Cruz
failed to ignite the masses that ultra-rightwing business money switched
to Trump.

The Koch Brothers let it be known that they and their network weren't backing Trump:

Even then the Koch brothers, who have funded rightwing pressure groups to the tune of $400m (£307m), kept their distance until their ally Pence was installed as Trump’s running mate.
If Pence becomes president it will be the true moment of revelation.
All the 3am garbage tweeted by Trump, all the waffle that comes out of
his mouth at rallies, will be seen as the surrealist prologue to the
main event. But what is the main event?

Pence is where they want him -- poised to take over at the appropriate time: The Kochs and their confederates have two objectives:

One, most clearly associated with the Koch brothers, is best described
by its adopted euphemism: “income defence”. It sees every dollar of the
US’s $19tn debt as a future claim on the profits of private enterprise;
it wants low taxation and – as Trump backer Robert Mercer is once reported to have said – a state “shrunken down to the size of a pinhead”

The other side of far-right ideology, by contrast, wants a repressive
state, imposed conservative social norms and – if necessary – an
eviscerated constitution to achieve it. If we analyse Trump through his
actions, rather than his garbled words, it is political illiberalism
that has won out during the first seven months of his presidency. When a
judge blocked his Muslim immigration ban, he attacked the judiciary’s
constitutional role. When the press revealed malfeasance, he labelled
them “enemies of the American people”. When James Comey refused Trump’s
appeals for “loyalty”, he was sacked.

Pence has long stood for those two objectives. And he's willing to drive full bore to achieve them. The worst is yet to come.

Monday, August 07, 2017

Anyway you look at it, Michael Harris writes, Donald Trump is a fascist. You can't pussyfoot your way around that conclusion:

I use the word fascist advisedly. If we are to square up to the facts,
what other way is there to describe Trump? Mussolini, whom Trump
unabashedly quoted during the presidential election campaign, said that
“fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of
corporate and government power.”

Could there be a better description of the Trump cabinet than that? A
collection of billionaires representing the corporate elite in the
United States, who now also control the levers of political power –
often without relinquishing their business conflicts?

Trump refuses to recognize the independence of the other branches of the American government:

Someone has apparently forgotten to tell the president that under the
system of checks and balances in U.S. governance, the Senate is
“co-equal” with the executive branch. But then fascists don’t lose much
sleep violating the constitution.

Nor did Trump hesitate to violate the independence of the Department
of Justice. The president lambasted his own attorney general for not
undertaking criminal investigations into government leaks and the
alleged crimes of Hillary Clinton. It is not the president’s job to
direct criminal prosecutions.

And it is certainly not Trump’s job to tell Special Counsel Robert
Mueller what he may or may not investigate when it comes to the Trump
campaign/Russia connection. There is an old saying in law: you can’t be
judge in your own cause, something fascists specialize in.

Trump's ignorance of the American Constitution -- which he is supposed to "protect and defend" -- is appalling. But his drive for absolute control makes him truly dangerous. And those who have enabled him, bear as much responsibility for the tragedy which has befallen the United States as he does:

Remember what Rick Perry said when he was running against Donald Trump for the Republican Party presidential nomination?

“Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

A year and a half later, Perry accepted the job as Trump’s energy secretary. Power corrupts.

Sunday, August 06, 2017

NAFTA is going to be re-negotiated. That's fine with Linda McQuaig, so long as workers get a piece of the action. She writes:

In reality, NAFTA has been key to the transformation of Canada over the
last two decades, enabling corporations to become ever more dominant
economically and politically, while rendering our labour force
increasingly vulnerable and insecure.

Indeed, the much-lamented rise in income inequality and feelings of
powerlessness among working Canadians aren’t mysterious consequences of
participating in the global economy. Rather, they’re the predictable
consequences of our country signing a trade deal that greatly empowers
corporations and their investors at the expense of everyone else.

The agreement's twenty year history makes it abundantly clear that corporations are in the driver's seat:

Gus Van Harten, an Osgoode Hall law professor and expert in international investment law, says NAFTA provides
“Exhibit A for how rules of the global economy have been rewritten to
favour large corporations and the superrich at the expense of the
general public.”

Van Harten is referring to
NAFTA’s Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement (ISDS) mechanism which,
amazingly, allows foreign corporations to sue governments over laws that
interfere with corporate profitability — even if those laws are aimed
at protecting the public from, say, environmental or health risks.

These corporate lawsuits are adjudicated by
special tribunals — notoriously sympathetic to corporate interests —
that can force governments to pay the corporations compensation (out of
our taxpayer dollars!) There’s no cap on the size of the awards.

Canada
has already been sued this way 39 times, and paid out more than $190
million, with the money mostly going to major corporations and extremely
wealthy investors, notes Van Harten. In addition, we don’t know how
many times governments have backed off from introducing laws, to avoid
provoking a NAFTA lawsuit.

The problem is that the push to empower labour won't come from the Americans:

But proposals that ISDS be eliminated are
unlikely to win support from, for instance, Rex Tillerson, U.S.
Secretary of State and former CEO of ExxonMobil, which won $14 million from Canada in a NAFTA lawsuit.

And
Trump, a billionaire whose companies (along with daughter Ivanka’s
fashion business) routinely outsource work to low-wage jurisdictions,
clearly has no interest in tampering with the wildly pro-corporate rules
of NAFTA.

And Justin Trudeau doesn't advocate changing the balance of power -- despite his rhetoric. So the push to empower labour will have to come from elsewhere.

Saturday, August 05, 2017

Now that the Republicans have failed to repeal Obamacare, Paul Krugman puts that failure in perspective. Obamacare failed because the Republicans' attempts to sabotage it really ticked people off:

I’m talking about the people who screamed at their congressional
representatives in town halls. People like, for example, the man who
pushed his wheelchair-bound son,
who was suffering from cerebral palsy, in front of a congressman,
yelling that President Obama’s health care plan would provide the boy
with “no care whatsoever” and would be a “death sentence.”

The reality, of course, is that people with pre-existing medical
conditions are among the A.C.A.’s biggest beneficiaries, and would have
had the most to lose if conservative Republicans had managed to repeal
the law. And this should have been obvious from the beginning.

Beyond that, it’s now clear (as should also have been clear from the
beginning) that very few people other than wealthy taxpayers were hurt
by health reform, which was designed to disrupt existing health
arrangements as little as possible.

Put bluntly, the Republican Party has been focused exclusively on the agenda favoured by the wealthiest Americans. And that focus has driven the party off the rails.

Friday, August 04, 2017

Tony Burman has reached several conclusions about the Trump presidency. The first is that it will come to a bad end. The second is that Trump is in the pocket of the Russian mob. The third is that the end of the Trump presidency will be a existential challenge to American democracy:

We are now getting a much clearer sense of
where this high-stakes drama is heading. The details may change but the
contours of this epic chapter in American political history are
beginning to emerge.

Although it has been another head-spinning week, perhaps the most important disclosure was a Washington Post story
(notwithstanding reports that Mueller empanelled a grand jury to probe
Russia’s ties to the 2016 campaign). The story suggested how centrally
involved Donald Trump has become in the expanding inquiry about his
secret connections with Russia.

Trump will do everything he can to stop the Mueller investigation:

Increasingly, it appears that the Mueller
investigation will help answer that question by examining the close but
largely secret relationship between the Trump empire and Russian
financial interests.

According to leaks, it
has only been in recent days that Trump has realized that this Mueller
probe, if not stopped, may even include an examination of his tax
returns that he has been so stubborn to keep secret.

A
revealing preview of what Mueller is undoubtedly discovering was
featured as the extensive cover story of September’s issue of the U.S.
magazine New Republic. Written by investigative journalist Craig Unger,
the story was titled: “Married to the Mob: What Trump Owes the Russian
Mafia.”

Unger was stark in his conclusions:
“Whether Trump knew it or not, Russian mobsters and corrupt oligarchs
used his properties not only to launder vast sums of money from
extortion, drugs, gambling and racketeering, but even as a base of
operations for their criminal activities. In the process, they propped
up Trump’s business and enabled him to reinvent his image. Without the
Russian mafia, it is fair to say, Donald Trump would not be president of
the United States.”

And, as Mueller zeros in on Trump, the Great Orange Id will become increasingly dangerous:

Like a cornered rat, he will fight to protect his interests. In every
conceivable way, he will work to stop Mueller’s probe, to challenge
Congress if it intervenes, to undermine the press and judiciary if they
get in the way and — yes — even to engage in reckless military
adventures if he thought that would strengthen his position.

And,of course, south of the border, The Great Orange Id is doing his best to destroy the norms and institutions which buttress American democracy. Most troubling is the yawn these assaults have elicited from ordinary folks:

Let’s be brutal: democracy is dying. And the most startling thing is
how few ordinary people are worried about it. Instead we
compartmentalise the problem. Americans worried about the present
situation typically worry about Trump – not the pliability of the most
fetishised constitution in the world to kleptocratic rule. EU
politicians express polite diplomatic displeasure, as Erdoğan’s AK party
machine attempts to degrade their own democracies. As in the early
1930s, the death of democracy always seems to be happening somewhere
else.

The problem is it sets new norms of behaviour. It is no accident that
the “enemies of the people” meme is doing the rounds: Orbán uses it
against the billionaire George Soros, Trump uses it against the liberal
press, China used it to jail the poet Liu Xiaobo and keep him in prison
until his death.

Today's autocrats, Mason writes, have become skilled in the art of what he calls "micromanaged non-dissent:"

Trump told a rally of supporters in Ohio
that the federal government was in fact “liberating” American cities
from immigrant crime gangs. They “take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15
and others and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they
want them to go through excruciating pain before they die”, he said. At
school – and I mean primary school – we were taught to greet such claims
about racial minorities with the question: “Really? When and where did
this happen?” Trump cited no evidence – though the US press managed to
find examples in which gang members had indeed hacked each other.

The autocrats know what they're doing. And they're relying on our apathy to succeed.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.